2013

To What End Are We Connecting the World?

In The Circle, Dave Eggers describes a near future where a
single company -- The Circle -- intermediates all communication.
Convinced of its own benevolence, Circle employees expand the company's
offerings into creepier and creepier domains, while propounding
punched-up versions of the philosophies of Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and
Mark Zuckerberg. Google's "organize the world's information" becomes
the Circle's "ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN." Facebook's power of
openness leads to "PRIVACY IS THEFT." Mark Zuckerberg's ideas about
integrity and single identity are implemented as the Circle's "TruYou"
technology.

Eggers uses the metaphor of animals in a fishtank to contrast the
three founders of the Circle and their vision for the company. But I
found it interesting to consider this metaphor as a critique of both
social media platforms and the users who feed and are devoured by them.
The Circle is presented as a blind, transparent shark. It devours
everything, and through its visible digestive system, allows everyone to
see its victims processed and turned into ash. Users are the many
offspring of a seahorse, adrift in the water unattended, being drawn
into the vortex created by the shark's circling. Users' curiosity, a
kind of anxious energy that causes us to want to know and explore
everything, is an octopus, which cannot escape the shark either.

Eggers' satire mimics rather than exaggerates Valley ideas about the
world. This has led some critics to suggest that the book lacks
elegance and is heavy handed. But the Circle is recognizable as a
post-Facebook-world Google. Google is no stranger to promoting its own
goodness while pursing an iron rule morality. Take, for instance, its
recent argument that because users of Wifi did not encrypt their
signals, the company was free to intercept them. Google's technical
ability to capture these signals meant it has the right to. In another
wiretapping case against the company, Google argued in court that when
one provides data to one of its services, Google can use that data as it
sees fit to improve that service or others. Eggers may be heavy
handed, but one of the key products he satires was just released by
Google -- "Shared Endorsements."

Those inside the Circle, in a culture insensitive to the consequences
of context collision, see complaints of privacy and indignities as
irrational, because any adoption of technology becomes a justification
for a complete embrace of it. This is reminiscent of Google's
justification for Gmail, its email service that scans email content in
order to target advertising. "If you let your ISP scan your email for
malware, why not let Google scan Gmail to target ads?"

With The Circle, Eggers wants readers to see adoption of
social technologies as a public goods problem. It's clear he does not
want to live in the panopticon that we are bringing to ourselves through
Facebook and Google. Eggers has studied Silicon Valley culture
carefully, levying a critique that echoes the ideas raised by Sherry
Turkle, Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, and others. The Circle's public
pronouncements might have been sourced from the @ProfJeffJarvis Twitter feed.

Eggers tells the story from the perspective of a young, suggestible,
female employee who is hired in a subordinate customer service role,
reminiscent of Katherine Losse's The Boy Kings. After this
employee commits a minor transgression, she is pressed into the Circle's
transparency mission. She goes "transparent," promising to wear a
camera to document almost every moment of her life. But this is where
Eggers' narrative goes too far. While Google and Facebook have done
much to press others into transparency, the companies themselves are
very secretive.

Artists' attention to the callow rhetoric of Google and Facebook
signals that public attitudes towards information policy may change
radically in the near future. The Circle joins Gary Shteyngart's hilarious Super Sad True Love Story
in its prediction of the kind of world we might get to live in if we
continue to outsource our data and decisions about it to Silicon
Valley's technocrats.